Spiritual Loneliness

Most of us have seen movies or television depictions of addicts in drug withdrawal.  One of the most moving performances that I recall was that of Diana Ross in the 1972 movie, "Lady Sings the Blues," which portrays the struggle that jazz icon Billie Holiday had with heroin.  Ross made her audience feel Holiday's pain. (I still think she deserved the Academy Award for the performance.)

As I've been withdrawing from work addiction, I too have been adjusting to physical changes.  While I have been working fewer hours and having more fun, I do find that I am often very tired, and I've been sleeping...a lot.

Work addiction triggers other addictions, and it ends up that one of the most destructive is adrenaline addiction.  Adrenaline is a powerful hormone, which nature gave us for emergencies--when we needed to pull out the stops and do something extraordinary.  The classic example is the mom which finds it within herself to lift a car when her child is trapped beneath it.  Adrenaline is supposed to help us do something extraordinary in unusual circumstances.

However, increasingly, adrenaline is being used just to get through our normal daily schedules, where multi-tasking and long hours have become the order of the day.  We, myself included, have often used it to keep us focused on what is in front of us in that moment...and the next...and the next.

I am sure that, rarely having needed the addictive hormone in the last month, I should expect some withdrawal symptoms.  Most troubling to me is how detached that I must have become to my body's physical needs.  Somehow the adrenaline has allowed me to push down my exhaustion so I didn't notice it until I was out from under the destructive influence of the hormone's destructive power when it is used habitually to just get through life.

More important than the physical withdrawal is the spiritual loneliness that I've been feeling.  Back in the day when I lived a normal, relaxed life, I meditated daily, and I prayed off and on all day. Dancing gave me a physical creative outlet almost daily.

My writing kept me in touch with my soul and how I connected with all of human kind through my soul.  Although I've had more time recently, I haven't written much in this blog for these weeks.  I have almost never, even as a child, sat down to write and not had words flow through me.

But, they just haven't been flowing.  I would sit and stare at the computer screen, and nothing would come.  Or a thought would come, and it would be gone as fast as it came because I'd be so physically tired from the adrenaline withdrawal.  Only this week have I been able to sit and get my words again.

Almost always in my life, I've been able to push through what was in front of me and get done what needed to get done.  I've thought that a good thing.  Determination and perseverance of qualities valued in our culture.  Now I am not sure that the ability to push through whatever is in front of me is a good thing, certainly not for me.  I've used those qualities instead of establishing priorities and setting boundaries.  I've tried to prove I could do it all, without ever asking myself "What is the value of doing it all?"  And even, "Is that value something that is meaningful to me?"

I've written a lot about intention, and I've even written about buying into our culture's expectations to the exclusion of our personal spiritual intentions.  And without adrenaline masking what was happening, I can see how I've been seduced by the cultural norms.  Now, stripped of the adrenaline, relaxed, and much more conscious, I feel spiritual loneliness.  I am aware that I've lost important pieces of myself along the way, and I haven't really known exactly how to begin reclaiming them.

As I write, deep within me is a muffled chuckle: "You had to come to this," it says.  On New Year's Eve 1997, I finished my first draft of a manuscript for the book Choice Point.  I worked on it for another couple of years after that, polishing it.  About 50 people read it and thought it was an important work.  I was never able to find a publisher for it.  In the craziness of the last 15 years, Choice Point has gathered dust on a shelf, becoming badly dated.

The book is about choosing your soul's intention for its life, rather than buying into expectations of the popular culture around us.  I believe the principles are solid, but when I wrote it in the 1990s, I was in my relaxed period, and I couldn't really understand, or maybe remember, what it was like to make those hard choices.  I hadn't made them for a very long time.  In the frenetic years, I couldn't write about them, because I wasn't conscious enough.  Now, in my spiritual loneliness, I see the potential to bring life to the manuscript with full consciousness of the spiritual sacrifices that we often make, without even being aware we are making them.  That is the knowing of the muffled, "You had to come to this."

My experience reflects this truth: when I am writing a book, I need to live it before it can be birthed into the world.  So it was with Leading from the Heart, subtitled "choosing courage over fear."  I repeatedly had to reach deep within myself to find the courage of my heart.  As I was birthing The Alchemy of Fear, I had to face some of my deepest fears.  I am not surprised then that the Universe has provided me with this opportunity to step into my spiritual loneliness and find the truth of Choice Point.